LOS ANGELES  There are 53 steps made of cut railroad ties leading from the 18th green at Riviera Country Club to the locker room. They might have been the last 53 steps Arron Oberholser walks in his PGA Tour career.

Oberholser is only 38 years old, still young in golf years. But his body has betrayed him.

In the year after he won his only PGA Tour event, the 2006 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, the San Luis Obispo native began suffering nagging pain in his left hand. Four surgeries would follow over the next four years to try to make it right.

The discomfort persisted and Oberholser didn’t make a single tour start in 27 months. He was resigned to retirement until a few weeks ago, when a well-known trainer believed he could make the arm right. So it was with cautious optimism that Oberholser beat balls, working hard on his game, and entered the Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club last week.

The hope lasted all of about six holes. Oberholser made a double bogey, bogey, bogey to finish a front nine of 40 at Riviera. He ended up shooting 77 in the first round, followed by a 75 to miss the cut by eight shots.

Those numbers might have been acceptable had they been due to rust, but Oberholser’s left arm was throbbing so badly when he got to the top of those 53 steps that he felt like it might fall off. He might not have been able to play the weekend, which was moot considering that, at 10 over par, Oberholser had beaten only two golfers in the field.

“I’m kind of at a crossroads,” Oberholser, quiet and clearly disappointed, said in a hallway at Riviera. “The whole apparatus still isn’t right. I know I can’t play a full year with how it feels the last two days. I can’t tell you that I’m going to continue playing. I’m in a pretty precarious position, potentially looking at the end of my career.”

Oberholser’s absence has been the PGA Tour’s loss. He looked like a rising star in 2006, finishing 23rd on the money list thanks to a five-shot win at Pebble – grounds about which the Northern California native had gushed. In the media, we’ve enjoyed him. He is intelligent, funny and has a command of language few athletes could match.

When he won at Pebble, the soft greens on the back nine at Spyglass played “like a Plinko board.” He “dorked” a 3-iron, “choked on some cotton” Sunday and a clump of mud on his ball was “the size of the Rock of Gibralter.”

When Oberholser missed a 3-foot putt at Spyglass, he reasoned with a shrug, “Lumpy doughnuts, man. Can’t make all of the 3-footers out here. Not even I can, and I love these greens.”

But in less than two years time he was all but gone. Oberholser played 10 events in 2008 and four in 2009 before shutting himself down for good in 2010, when he underwent two surgeries on his hand and one on his hip.